Lifestyle

CheapAir Makes Searching For Travel Simpler, More Intuitive

CheapAir.com launched a new search ability on its website that lets users enter natural language to search for travel deals, the company announced on Friday.

Now you can type in where you want to go and which dates you'd like to travel in plain English — similar to how you type things into Google Search. For example: "sfo jfk nov1 nov4 1 adult." This new feature is called "Easy Search." Users of CheapAir.com can still search for travel deals the typical way — by using a calendar to select the dates and typing in the city, but Easy Search is another option to find travel deals, especially for those who find clicking through calendars and airport codes tedious.

CheapAir.com is one of a few travel websites offering this semantic search feature. Bing offers a natural search feature, and so does Y Combinator startup Adioso (which criticized Bing for not having true natural search).

"More specifically," he added. "We've felt for a long time that being able to search using natural language instead of tedious forms is the wave of the future so we've been working on this technology for a while. It's pretty complicated and we've admittedly only scratched the surface. But the nice thing is that the system will learn over time and start to recognize more and more variations. It will get better and better, and we're really excited about it."

What do you think of the new Easy Search feature? Tell us in the comments.

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